As much as I love to take on a challenge and cook an exciting new recipe, it’s also a hassle to break my routine and invest in a new set of ingredients.  On top of that, I haven’t had much time to do much grocery shopping for myself, which is ironic since I work for a company that is all about grocery shopping.

Instead of looking for recipes, I’m looking to explore new ingredients and versatile ways to use them. I’ll be poking around other people’s kitchens and asking what they do with their staple ingredients.   Why am I doing this?  Hopefully to draw some culinary inspiration, change up my usual shopping list and ultimately, to expand my cooking repertoire.

This is the first of a series of Wunderkammer Interviews.  The concept behind the name Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities”, being that everyone has their own individual cabinet(s) of curiosities.  Just look in your kitchen.

My first victim, Talisa.

And her kitchen in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

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Wun•der•kam•mer (noun): 1. “wonder room” in German; 2. encyclopedic collections of types of objects whose categorical boundaries included natural history, geology, ethnography, archeology, religious or historical relics, works of art, and antiquities.  Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe, formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Reinterpreting the original concept of the Wunderkammer, this new thread on World to Table is going to feature modern day (kitchen) cabinets of curiosities.  It wasn’t until Talisa and I shared what we usually stock up in our respective kitchens, that I realized how different our pantries and cooking habits really were.  Asparagus, couscous and ricotta are solid staples in her kitchen, while mine is almost never without an abundance of tomatoes, a loaf of Pullman bread, or a giant chunk of Parmesean.  We’ll be exploring a wide range of cooking spaces — from the big to the small, from the sparse to the cluttered.

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